As a teenager, Chiune Sugihara deliberately failed his medical school entrance exam by writing nothing but his name. Decades later, that same signature, written thousands of times, saved roughly 6,000 lives. This episode follows his path from Waseda University and a talent for Russian to Harbin, Manchuria, where he negotiated the Northern Manchurian Railway price down from 625 million to 140 million yen, converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, and resigned in 1934 to protest the military's treatment of the Chinese population.

In 1939 he was posted to Kaunas, Lithuania, officially as vice consul and unofficially as an intelligence officer. When Polish Jewish refugees found themselves trapped by the Soviet occupation, a bureaucratic loophole involving the Dutch colony of Curacao and Soviet Intourist fees created a fragile escape route tha ...